Website Design Blog. Evoart

If you haven’t already heard of del.icio.us, where oh where have you been?! I recall discovering it about 2 and a half years ago and ever since its been my homepage - thats just how valuable it is to me. In this article we’ll look at how designers can really benefit from using del.icio.us over Google, and hopefully you’ll all make it your homepage today. I promise it will be worth it.

What is del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site - thats all there is to it. People sign up for a free account and store all their bookmarks in one place, filed neatly under whats known as ‘tags’. Del.icio.us is soooo damn good because you can see what all the other millions and millions of users are bookmarking. If over 100 people have bookmarked something then you know it must be useful.

Sounds good, but why should I use it?

Well you can use del.icio.us in a few ways. You can use it to;

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more.

How can it help me as a designer?

The best feature to take advantage of is the ability to ’search’.

Because Del.icio.us aggregates the most popular pages on the internet in one place (according to people like you and me, instead of Google, which just returns the best optimized pages, not the best pages content wise) you can quickly and easily find really invaluable resources.

As designers theres no question that we’re always on the look out for new resources. Whether it be fonts, brushes, inspiration or articles about web standards - the list goes on. Instead of rushing off to Google as so many people do, next time you find yourself trying to track down a stylish font or a free textures site, head over to Del.icio.us.

Give it a shot now. Try something like ‘free textures‘.